Religious Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 19, 1883

Religious Notes.

By Editor

—Florida is having twenty-six new Protestant Episcopal churches built.

—The American Sunday-school Union organized last year 2,252 new schools, with 10,376 teachers, and 82,749 scholars.

—All the Methodist bodies of New Zealand are agitating the question of uniting their forces and making one body. We cannot see what is to hinder.

—Four Jewish rabbis, graduates of the Hebrew Union College, were consecrated at Cincinnati, July 11. This is the first time the ceremony has ever been performed in this country.

—The Captain and Lieutenant of the Salvation Army at Bridgeport, Conn., have been arrested for disturbing the peace, fined, and bonded not to parade or hold meetings in the streets in future. An appeal has been taken.

—The salaries of the clergymen of the United States are about $6,000,000 a year. The dog-tax nets the Government about $16,000,000 a year, and the Commissioner of Agriculture says it costs $50,000,000 to feed them.

—The Russian Government proposes to appoint an Ambassador to the Vatican. The Pope has summoned the French Bishop to Rome for the purpose of consulting with him in regard to the condition of the Church in France.

—According to the St. Louis Christian Evangelist, in the State of New York there are 770,000 children who never attend Sunday-schools. Some of them may have Christian home-training, but most of them are growing up without God, and without hope in the world.

—Dr. Withrow, of Boston, said in a recent sermon: “There was a day when New England was reverent to the last degree, but to-day it doubts almost everything essential; it promises the sinner that if he is not saved here, he will be saved somewhere else, and so our churches are dying.”

—In the Episcopal Convention of the Diocese of Illinois, a resolution was introduced asking the General Convention to change the name of the church from “Protestant Episcopal” to “Holy Catholic.” So much opposition was manifested to the proposition that the resolution was withdrawn.

—An uncompleted Methodist church building, on account of insolvency, was sold under the hammer, and afterwards used as an ice house. The Christian Register, remarking on the singular use to which it was put, says: “Are they not often put to a similar use without the formality of a sale at auction?”

—Dr. Potter, of New York, says: “A religionist who manifests symptoms of being thoroughly in earnest, and who talks of salvation from sin and the penalties of sin, as though it were the supreme need of the soul, is regarded with a languid and half contemptuous curiosity as a man who must be out of his mind.”

—Judge Joseph P. Bradley, of the U. S. Supreme Court, has an article in the Evangelist, in which he considers “the year and day of Christ's crucifixion.” The conclusion from his careful investigation is that “Christ entered upon his thirtieth year in A. D. 26, and that his crucifixion took place on Friday, A. D. 30.”

—Dr. Blanchard writes in the Christian Cynosure about the great number of unconverted church members that exist in all denominations. He says: “They deny the inspiration of the Scriptures, they avow infidel sentiments, they are thoroughly wedded to the world, they live in sin, they are precisely like the children of the devil in their principles, their aims, their amusements, their conduct, and their conversation, and their fear is quieted, because they belong to the church.”

—The following from the San Francisco daily Alta is not bad for a secular paper: “A State Convention of Free-Thinkers is to meet in Rochester, N. Y., August 29, and the parties who are getting it up have served a notice on the Christian denominations to send a missionary, who will be given two hours on the platform to make a defense of religion against the attacks of infidelity. The coolness of this proposition seems to imply that its authors believe the fate of the Christian religion hangs on the proceedings of the Rochester Convention, and that they have generously resolved to give Christianity a chance to be heard before it is sentenced to death. Probably the churches will look at it differently and take no notice of the matter further than to inform the police of the intended assemblage.”